Gemstone’s MagLev presented at RubyConf

3 June, 2008

Avi Bryant joined Gemstone’s Bob Walker at RailsConf last week for a presentation (summarised here) describing MagLev, a Ruby VM built on the same technology as Gemstone/S, offering transparent persistence, and so the possibility of massive scalability, to Ruby applications. Despite only being under development for three months, with the initial focus being on scalability rather than speed, MagLev is already able to run Ruby code at speeds comparable or better than established Ruby implementations, with orders of magnitude improvements in some cases.

For Smalltalkers, one particularly interesting feature of MagLev, from an interview with Bob Walker by InfoQ, is that it retains the ability to execute Smalltalk code as well as Ruby, and should support image-based development.